Blog

16/03/2018

In our new blog Jennie Chinembiri reflects on the tragedy of South Sudan and a project in peace building undertaken by the Church of Scotland.

The first and only time I have visited South Sudan was in early 2012. As the newest nation in the world, it was a country full of hope. People were migrating from the North back to the South with a hope that they hadn’t had for years. This was their country and they were going to build this new nation up.

Sadly, less than two years later civil war broke out. It was devastating listening to our partners, hearing the stories of what was happening, and seeing pictures of buildings and homes that I had visited now lying in ruin or burnt to the ground. It was difficult to comprehend that Malakal, the town our church partners had been based in and the town I had spent time in, was now a ghost town.

What could we do to help? The Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of South Sudan visited our General Assembly in 2014 and told us how he stood at the entrance of the church compound in front of rebels with guns, and refused them entry. He had a duty to protect those in his care. The rebels listened and lives were spared.

It was on this visit that he invited our then Moderator, the Right Rev John Chalmers to visit Juba in 2015. During this visit John spent a morning with around 80 or so church members delivering a session on mediation. John told me how people had arrived at the session and met friends that they believed had been killed. It was a meeting at which emotions were raw.

After this session, our partner asked us to do more, and not to forget. So, we as a Church have embarked on a journey with the Presbyterian Church of South Sudan. We have begun working with them to deliver mediation skills and also touch on trauma healing. We have had two workshops, both in Nairobi due to security issues, at which we have begun to develop a deeper relationship with these church leaders and hear their stories first hand.

We are now looking forward to welcoming nine of these leaders to Scotland on 5th March for a two and a half week programme, which will focus on peace building, mediation and trauma healing, and will end with a retreat. We had hoped to bring 11 leaders, but two have had their visas rejected, something we are currently fighting and hoping the home secretary will overturn.

It is a privilege to work with these men and women who have experienced and seen a level of suffering that we can only imagine. They want to share their stories. They don’t want the world to forget about South Sudan. We hope that in some small way we can help them to do this.

09/03/2018

Sciaf Sunday - 11th March 2018

Marian Pallister, SCIAF ambassador for the Diocese of Argyll & the Isles and Justice & Peace vice chair reflects on the country on which the Wee Box campaign focuses this Lent.

It was the first time I had been to a war zone, if you discount passing through the checkpoints of Northern Ireland. The preparation in itself was complicated – the rushed vaccinations, the visa for Thailand, the rather vague information about how we would contact the Scottish Red Cross nurse we were to interview in the refugee camps on the border with Kampuchea and Thailand.

For that is what Cambodia was called between 1975 and 1979 by the ruling Khmer Rouge, and I was travelling with a photographer to report on the end of a bloody conflict that left millions dead and thousands homeless.

It was a byzantine story that led to this humanitarian disaster. The Vietnamese had occupied eastern Cambodia, the US carpet bombed the area, and the Cambodian politician Norodom Sihanouk, leader of the Khmer Rouge, presented himself as a man who could achieve peace. Instead, he led his people into genocide. Now the International Red Cross was trying to pick up the pieces, setting up a tented city on the north-east border of Thailand to receive the refugees from each side of the conflict.

It was tense. The Thai soldiers guarding the camps were trigger-happy. The Red Cross personnel were there for three-month stints and were physically and emotionally done in. There was no technology to record who these people were or how many. No system to track the unaccompanied children and reunite them with the remnants of their families. Huge boards went up at the gate to every camp with photographs of the children – a haphazard attempt to let frantic relatives find their offspring. But the children took the pictures down and gave them to nurses, doctors, the Scottish dentist who’d arrived out of nowhere to fix shot-up faces and save people from starvation. They wanted someone who would care now, not the vague possibility of a happy-ever-after reunion.

One child, Ra, latched onto me as we toured the camps and did our interviews – the dying elderly couple, the man showering under a bucket, balancing on his remaining leg, the woman whose husband was shot as an ‘intellectual’ because he wore glasses. Ra clutched my hand and broke my heart. I didn’t know what would become of her.

‘Cambodia’ came back into existence in the 1990s. Those camps remained in place for decades. Girls like Ra might well have ended up in the sleazy sex parlours of Bangkok – or she might have slipped back into the steaming tropical forest and tried to re-create a life for herself. If she survived, she would be a middle-aged woman by now.

The country was devastated. The American bombing had destroyed much of the infrastructure and the Khmer Rouge did the rest. Cambodia became a graveyard and its population is still trying to pick up the pieces.

And that’s why the Lang family on our SCIAF Wee Box this year deserves our attention. Four decades isn’t enough to stick the pieces of a country and a culture back together again and rural families like the Langs are prey to a continuing lawlessness.

Families like the Langs depend on fish in the huge, languid rivers of Cambodia. But gangs have used dynamite and electrocution to steal fish stocks. Then they move on and leave the rural fishing families devastated.

SCIAF has worked with a local partner to create an advocacy system to help such families, and now local fishermen liaise with the police to patrol the rivers. The Langs are in a better situation now, thanks to your generosity – and by working to secure peaceful solutions, Cambodians have the kind of future I didn’t think I’d see in my lifetime.

Let’s fill our Wee Boxes. Be generous on SCIAF Sunday (the UK government is doubling what SCIAF raises). We might just be helping that wee lassie who held my hand to live out her life in peace.

02/03/2018

Come On In

As we enter the final week of Fairtrade Fortnight Justice and Peace Scotland Commissioner Margaret McGowan writes our blog and reflects on her involvement and campaigning for the Fairtrade cause.

‘Let each one examine his conscience. Is he or she prepared to support out of his own pocket works and undertakings in favour of the most destitute? .... Is he or she ready to pay a higher price for imported goods so that the producer may be more justly rewarded?’Pope Paul VI

Fairtrade Fortnight 2018 runs from 26 February to 11 March and is a chance to learn about the working conditions of people who produce the commodities we often take for granted.

The theme for 2018 is ‘Come on in’, inviting people to join the Fairtrade movement and learn more about how Fairtrade impacts the lives of producer communities across the world. Through Fairtrade, millions of poor farmers and workers are already coming together to demand change. With Fairtrade’s support, they aim to stop exploitation and transform their communities.

Last October I campaigned in support of the ‘Don't Ditch Fairtrade’ campaign outside my local Sainsbury’s. This supermarket chain, the UK’s largest retailer of Fairtrade products, weakened fair trade power by replacing the Fairtrade Mark from some of their own-brand tea with a ‘Fairly Traded’ label. They decided to abandon Fairtrade and pilot their own scheme.

Tea farmers will no longer be able to decide for themselves how to spend what they earn through the Fairtrade Premium. This may mislead customers into thinking ‘Fairly Traded’ is the same as independent Fairtrade certification.

It's not.

The concern is that this new ‘Fairly Traded’ tea, and any products that follow it, could mean an unfair deal for poor farmers.

The outcome of the Brexit deal will also impact on Fairtrade. Trade rules are being rewritten and new trade deals negotiated. As well as changes in our lives, it could be make or break time for millions of farmers and workers from the world’s poorest countries who rely on trading with us.

It could be the moment the UK starts trading in a way that delivers a fair deal for everyone by creating a high standard in trade policy that tackles global poverty - or the new trade rules might drastically harm the poorest people who work hard to grow the food we take for granted.

It should disturb us to learn that most of the cacao in chocolate is picked by child slaves in the Ivory Coast or that coffee farmers are starving when millions of pounds are being spent each year on lattes and cappuccinos We have to rethink what how we buy things.

The idea that Fairtrade items cost more isn’t necessarily correct. I have often thought about putting a price comparison beside for example, coffee in our Fairtrade stall. A packet of artisan roasted fairly traded, handpicked, shade grown organic coffee is no more expensive than a similar packet of similar quality regular coffee. It is the perception not the price that appears to be the issue. If you are throwing a £1.50 bar of chocolate in your trolley at the supermarket you notice it less than if you are buying it at a church Fairtrade stall.

Fairtrade is based on cooperation and mutual benefit, and is in many ways consistent with the Catholic vision for economic activities that promote the Common Good. By purchasing Fairtrade products, we are putting the values of Catholic Social Teaching into action. Our Fairtrade purchases respect human dignity, promote economic justice and cultivate global solidarity.

Pope Francis said the global crisis ‘will not be completely over until situations and living conditions are examined in terms of the human person and human dignity’. Fair trade allows us to acknowledge the dignity of people and purchase items in mutual respect for what they have made.

‘I was hungry and you gave me food…thirsty and you gave me drink…’

To me this is God’s call to us, to take care of those in His world who have less than we do. That is why Fairtrade should matter.

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